Silent Hill 4: The Room

When reviewing games it is generally understood that you have to play them to the end before you can objectively evaluate them. This is considered professional. Of course this means you will be investing many, many hours of research into writing something that will probably net you 10 dollars in the end. Because of this I suspect that many reviewers fudge on this unwritten rule and I don’t blame them. Most games are just too long. Even the best can wear out their welcome before the credits roll. So much the worse if it is a bad game.

Silent Hill 4 begins on a high note with a powerful demo movie that promises a game full of intense freak outs. Cut together from game play footage, the clip is a three minute case study in Japanese Neo Horror. Then the game starts.

Henry Townshend wakes up one day to find himself trapped inside his standard issue, one bedroom/one bath apartment. The windows are sealed and the door is barred by chains. His stereo spits out a stream of static noise. Henry is confused and suffering from a splitting headache. I’m thinking; ‘yeah, I’ve been here before’. After wandering aimlessly around his tiny, sparsely furnished bachelor pad for a while, I realize that I really have been here before. It was back in 1992, in a mostly forgotten point-and-click adventure by Cyberdreams called “Dark Seed”.

Eventually I find an inter dimensional worm hole that leads me to a variety of impressively rendered hellscapes. Much whacking, stabbing, and stomping ensues. Frankly, the Silent Hill series’ dogged emphasis on combat as some kind of selling point for the game is tiresome. Engaging in physical combat with supernatural/hallucinatory entities never made much sense and feels increasingly out of place. Silent Hill 4 only underscores the problem by incorporating enemies that can not be killed. No matter how many times you beat them down and step on their heads they will always get up and continue chasing you. How about a Silent Hill game with no combat at all?

I gave up on the game at the halfway point when the designers made the incredible decision to loop around and make you play through every location that you’ve already been to over again. Now, I understand that back tracking and revisiting areas that you’ve previously explored is a time honored tradition in videogames, particularly in the Survival Horror genre, but Silent Hill 4 takes it to the ridiculous extreme. It’s as if you were witnessing the exact moment at which Konami collectively threw up its hands and said; “That’s it folks. We’ve got nothing.”

Side note: The Silent Hill series’ sound designer and composer; Akira Yamaoka is one of the game industry’s most interesting and radical musicians. In Silent Hill 4 his unique sound is largely absent, further weakening a deeply half-assed effort.

directed by Suguru Murakoshi

Sony Playstation 2
Konami
2004

game review by J.B. Fleming, 11-18-05